Good machine for the money

I am getting older (I admit it), I am getting tired of fighting with my home built water cooled gaming rig. With no one to call, except myself, when things decide to go bad I am getting tired. I really enjoyed building it at the time but lately as it randomly locks up, I started wondering if the maintenance effort was outweighing the fun factor. After doing a lot of research I decided to get a Dell XPS before they kill the brand and go totally Alienware (check with some tech websites for more info). My wife has been very happy with her XPS desktop and I was impressed with the build quality.

As I built many test versions on the Dell website I started to settle on the 420 line because of the cost. As you inch up the XPS line you can spend some serious coinage, and get some great performance. Since my hard core gaming has been replaced by more video and photo editing, my needs have changed. If you take away killer game framerates as a requirement, your options really open up. I was able to find this XPS420 with a Quad core processor, 3GB RAM, 500GB HD and an ATI Radeon XT 2600 video card for around $900. Then when Best Buy had 18 months same as cash I decided to get one. Fortunately for me they had a unit that had just been returned in an unopened box for $100 less. Sweet!

When I got home I initialized the Dell system restore function which brought the hard drive back to prepurchase state since the Best Buy tech support had booted the system up and gave it a once over. This gave me a fresh machine to work with and I have been very happy so far.

Sure I had to migrate all my data and stuff, but I keep all my data on a physically separate hard drive so all I really had to do was remove it from my old machine and install it on this one. Then I had the joy of installing all my apps but over the past few days it has gone well. Vista is working great on this machine, in stark contrast to my home built witch has always been a bit picky about Vista.

This machine has a neat side view small LCD screen on the front top of the unit that can display different “gadgets” that you can install. Dell has installed a few that enable it to view photos or system info. It is kind of neat to follow that CPU load or RAM level without having a window open on your desktop. I wouldn’t make it a deal breaker but it is kind of cool. This unit also has a multi media card reader which should handle any digital flash memory that I can throw at it. No Bluetooth though.

The unit is very quiet. Almost as quiet as my water cooled system which I built to get the ambient noise down. Dell has always done a great job on acoustics. I was worried about the chipset cooling on my home built system so I installed a case fan, thus defeating the stealthy system concept I started with.

Anyway, this system hasn’t really burped once. The only semi weird thing is that sometimes the mouse would have the click point offset from the correct position. After checking various forums I discovered that it was a know issue with the ATI drivers and now that I updated the drivers from the Dell site everything is working great.

It is nice to have a place to go if things go wrong and not suffer through the finger pointing of video card, motherboard, power supply, memory manufacturers, and whoever else I bought stuff from, telling me that the various problems are not their fault.

To make a car analogy; this XPS line is like a nice BMW 335 sedan, not a temperamental Ferrari or a boring econo box. That is not a bad thing . . .

As I live with the unit more I will update the review.

Bradman